It’s been reported* that professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but up to 50% looking for it. This represents huge organizational costs.

IT research and analysis organization The Butler Group** reported that ineffective searches and time wasted looking for information can cost companies up to 10% in salary expenses.

From old invoices to contracts and emails, the sheer amount of information the typical business needs to store and locate is staggering. What really complicates the picture is the different storage types and different locations that are used to hold it all. It’s little wonder important pieces of the puzzle simply slip through the cracks and can prove very time consuming and costly to track down.

PaperFree allows you to securely store and search online for all your documents (regardless of format) from one simple interface.

Send us your documents, we securely scan and store, and then you access them whenever you need them via a simple keyword search, online, highlighting the words/phrases on the relevant page.

And because all your documents are securely backed up online, you and your colleagues can access them anywhere in the world.

Having quick access to documents not only saves you time, stress and money internally, but allows you to provide a smoother experience to your clients. And who doesn’t want happy customers!?

Sources:
**http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/102006-search-cuts-productivity.html

*http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2008/10/10-fast-facts-a.html

We are all striving for more freedom to get things done on the move. Witness the seemingly insatiable demand for mobile apps – the by-words of the iPhone generation are virtualisation and convergence. Virtual versions of all previously separate hardware- or specific place-bound activities, turned into software and wrapped up in the one, pocket-sized device. Games on the move, Weather reports on the move, Lead-tracking on the move…

Most of us struggle with competing work commitments. Having several projects on the go, not to mention general admin obligations and management duties, leads to piles of paperwork. Getting through it all never seems to make it off the to-do list and ties us to our desks.

So the fact that you’re often away from the office is now just a fact of the competitive landscape. Staying mobile keeps you agile and responsive – whatever it is your client needs. But have your work tools and practices kept pace, or is paper dragging you down? Most of us have felt it…you leave documents behind by mistake, you break a sweat having to carry huge amounts of paperwork with you.

What would it be like to have access to all your documents electronically, all the time? PaperFree allows you to access all your documents, not just those which began life in digital form, wherever you are and whenever you need them. Cardfile customer records? Filed paper warranty records? An elusive invoice for the tax-man? Simply search for the document you need, and voila!, all the information you need is at hand. It might as well be Google, but for your paper.

Secure assignable login credentials means that you can grant access to colleagues, partners or your service providers and they can access the documents safely and easily from anywhere also. So everybody’s wealthier !

My name is Jason Patton and I’m the co-founder and CEO of PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper. What we exist to do is to save you time, save you money and save the planet by PaperFree’ing your business:

• We free your information from the paper it’s printed on (ever tried to Google your paper archives?)
• We free your paper from your offices and archives, feeding it back into the recycling cycle
• We free you from your paper problems

In October 2008, PaperFree co-founder Wayne Butcher had had enough. He was moving house yet again, and was frustrated at having to blow the dust off several storage boxes and lever arch files full of paper. You know, all those myriad papers that for the most part he would never take a second look at, but just had to keep, either for his business internally, or to satisfy the tax man, or for any other reason.

He thought to himself “in the age of space tourism, genetic fingerprinting and nano-manufacturing, there must be a simpler, better, and d*mnit, a greener way to deal with all these papers! With mobile ambitions, the thought of storing the boxes in his dad’s shed didn’t quite cut it. (His dad was none too keen on the idea either!) And with a lean budget, the big-end-of-town pricing of a traditional archive storage and retrieval firm didn’t fit the bill either. The PaperFree seed had sprouted…

The concept:

1. You give all your paper files/archives/records/forms/docs to us (in envelopes or boxes that we provide)
2. We securely digitise (scan) them and store them online
3. You and your trusted service providers can search them – anytime, anywhere

Wayne’s story and basic idea hit a strong chord with me and after running it by as many people as would listen, we soon realised that there was a ready army of paper slaves out there, just waiting to be ‘Freed.

So we are building it – PaperFree - The Search Engine for Your Paper.

Let’s be clear about one thing upfront – we are not proposing to turn yours into a “paperless office”. The paperless office was a dystopian myth of the 80s that we suggest is best forgotten (along with a few other things from that decade…)

On the contrary, we REJOICE in paper. Paper can be so incredibly useful – handy, quick, simple, often even beautiful (if sometimes just a little dangerous…paper cuts – ouch!) There will always be a place for it – we can think of at least 13 legitimate uses for paper right here. It’s just that it gets put to use in PLENTY of inappropriate, unsustainable ways as well, and that simply cannot go on. For example, one of those inappropriate, unsustainable and just plain unnecessary uses is stored tax records. The ATO has ruled on this, and it is quite clear that if done right, a digitised copy is just as good as the original. So, let’s free up that paper and put all those scrappy receipts back into the recycling cycle!

PaperFree the service is all about “lean & green” – good for your business and good for the planet. A very important thing to us about PaperFree, the company behind the service, is that it itself be started up, run and of course prosper, in a lean fashion. That’s to say we don’t like waste. Wasted paper, wasted energy, wasted time, wasted resources of any kind.

I tell you this here because we are currently pre-launch, running a Test User Group (TUG), and looking to form a community of like-mindeds – please get in touch with us if you, like us, are keen on lean & green!

If you know already that this is just you all-over, then we have a pretty sweet deal for the 100 founding members, so please sign-up here.